NIERMAN, LEONARDO

NIERMAN, LEONARDO (1932– ), Mexican artist. Nierman sought a relationship between abstract art and cosmic phenomena. In 1956 he painted a mural at the Mexico University School of Commerce. In 1965 he executed a mural for the Golden West Savings Bank in San Francisco, California, and in 1966 made the stained glass windows at the Jewish Cultural Center of Mexico City. Collected all over the world, Nierman is considered by many to be Latin America's greatest abstract artist. In 2002 the mayor of Chicago proclaimed a Leonardo Nierman Day, and in 2003 he received the Gloria Award from the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago. "Painting," he wrote, "is to me the aperture through which it is possible to enter a certain world; in it the viewer may find an endless number of magic images, objects, remembrances, associations, fears, joys, hopes and dreams.… It is my non-verbal world surrounded by combat, stress and sights; joy, sensuality and death. Dreams, moments of ecstasy in the creation of images. Piercing the darkness, radiant smoke and dust, a world of volcanic vapors, lava, storms, prehistoric vegetation, bottoms of oceans, enchanted caves filled with stars, precious stones and cosmic winds ascending into the silence of infinity."